UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

John Docker excoriates another field — Genocide Studies. Mainstream Genocide Studies has scored a temporary ideological victory by dismissing those who have compellingly showed why the Nakba, in fact the ongoing Nakba should qualify as an example of genocide. Furthermore, the gatekeeper of Genocide Studies have clearly aligned with Zionist Israel by holding a conference on the Hebrew University’s campus in Occupied Jerusalem despite a Palestinian-led call to desist from going ahead. Docker usefully shows how Damian Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide resonates with Said’s The Question of Palestine. Short, as explained by Docker, embraces Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide as a two-phase process of destruction and replacement constituted by:

… convergent processes that attempt to destroy the foundations of a society so that it can no longer exist as a society; processes that certainly might involve mass killing including massacres, but can also encompass methods of destruction and replacement that engage many dimensions, including the political, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic.

It’s through this lens that Americans have celebrated Columbus Day since the 1930s. But with the realization that the Native American people may not have appreciated acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing, Columbus Day is now increasingly being shunned for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

But the struggle of indigenous activists isn’t limited to the Americas. Much as the Native Americans view Columbus Day, the Palestinian people view the creation of the state of Israel, a day they commemorate on May 15 each year as youm al-Nakba, which means “day of catastrophe” in Arabic.

While there has been recent criticism of those taking the position that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, there is a long history of human rights scholarship and legal analysis that supports the assertion. Prominent scholars of the international law crime of genocide and human rights authorities take the position that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people could constitute a form of genocide. Those policies range from the 1948 mass killing and displacement of Palestinians to a half-century of military occupation and, correspondingly, the discriminatory legal regime governing Palestinians, repeated military assaults on Gaza, and official Israeli statements expressly favoring the elimination of Palestinians.

… the concept of genocide is clearly relevant to how we should understand the Israeli/ Palesttinian situation. In terms of physicaal destruction, thousands more Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Nakba…

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has issued a statement in the occasion of the anniversary of Nakba Day, a day marked by Palestinians as formation of Israeli usurping regime in 1948 as their ‘day of catastrophe.’.. “Since May 14, 1948 when the inglorious and illegitimate regime of Israel came to being in the heartland of Islamic world, that is, 68 years ago, the day of Nakba has been reminiscence of the gloomiest day of the Palestinians and endless days of suffering when millions of Palestinians have displaced and become homeless; the 1948 events were the forerunners of even darker days of genocide of the Palestinians which ensued during the next decades by Zionists…”

But to Palestinian activists, the day commemorating the establishment of the State of Israel is a painful occasion and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism… Nawash added that wishing Israel a happy independence day is a harmful message that amounts to advocating for “cultural genocide” against Palestinians. “When I celebrate the birth of Israel, I am celebrating wiping the identity of the history and culture of Palestinians,” he said. He said Israel destroyed the fabric of Palestinian society, both in Israel and the Palestinian territories, because of splintering caused by Nekba.

Al Asmar told Newsweek Middle East, the play “is a true expression of the mass memory” of the Palestinian people. “This memory has begun when the Zionist military gangs [the precursor to the Israeli Army] committed genocide against the Palestinian people and [forced] them out of their cities to establish Israel in 1948.”

… the IEB disregards more than a century of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, including Israel’s establishment through the dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), a regime that veteran South African freedom fighters call “worse than apartheid.”

The Nakba also known as the ‘catastrophe’ signifies the ethnic cleansing and the incremental genocidal process that occurred against the Palestinians by the State of Israel in 1948 which caused the dispossession and displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homelands; forced to settle in refugee camps such as Al Yarmouk in neighboring countries of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan as well as the camps for the internally displaced within what are known as the occupied territories of 1967 of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.